Gad, we have so many ways to pass judgment, don’t we? And hardly any of them actually mean anything. In my part of New Jersey as a kid, I was a person with an Irish name living in my mother’s Italian neighborhood {full of Italian aunts and uncles and cousins in houses up and down the street}. The Italians had it in for the Irish. The Irish had it in for Italians. What fun. They both thought they were better than a lot of other immigrants from NYC across the river, and absolutely looked down on Jews and Blacks and Asians and….Well, everybody else.

But my mother taught me that every person needs to be engaged on their own terms, as their own person, and I should not ever make up my mind until I met and got to know someone.

In math class, they taught us what statistics can do — they can predict broad trends, but not individual people, or even individual groups, and not individual events … Oh, anybody reading this already knows this stuff.

We are SO tribal, add it shuts down the ability for us ALL to live our best lives beside each other.

There was probably a time when that “tribal” attitude had “survival” value — when we were hunter-gatherers, ranging nomads, scavenging for our sustenance and knowing who was part of our clan, working for our benefit, and who was competing for resources, was important when meeting a “stranger.”

In a world as overfilled as the one we are on, we cannot function sustainably on a “competing for resources” basis. If we don’t learn to maximize productivity and shareability and how to live together, we will wind up with powerful groups surviving and thriving, and others suffering and starving … Actually, we have both of those scenarios in parts of the world right now. And we’ve had dominant and subservient groups for centuries … Some of us think it’s wrong to write off huge cultures and segments of people as expendable, no biggie if they don’t thrive, just because they’re not part of “our” tribe. Some of us think our tribe is “humanity” — all of it.

And we’ve created entities to address the privations and problems, to deliver relief to suffering people, whether they look like us or not. Others think altruism is a fault and not a virtue. And they want to shut us down when we try to help strangers.

{If we continue to overfill our container — the surface of our planet — this is going to become an even WORSE issue, as our DNA prescribes tribalism, and the natural tendency for an overfilled container is to try to kill off some of the entities overfilling it …. Oy, what sort of planet do we want to live on —

Dog eat dog? Or people taking care of each other?}

Yeah, my conversation is going into the weeds …

But it’s all related.

If you’re OK with dog-eat-dog, turn the page.

If you want people to take care of each other,

Vote Blue, and try to MAKE IT BETTER….And recognize what racism looks like, and try to get past it.